Ashnik designs a Container log monitoring platform using ELK for a leading bank in Singapore
The Customer:
The customer is one of the leading multinational banks in Singapore offering a broad range of financial services like commercial banking and wealth management services to its clients.
The Challenge:
The customer wanted to have a single, unified view of monitoring the performance of their applications along with logs that were deployed in containers and VMs.
The Solution:
Ashnik’s team of ELK experts helped with the installation, source ingestion, and integration, and also provided support on dashboarding with alerts.
The Benefits:
Post implementation of a real-time monitoring system, the customer was able to obtain actionable insights which can be utilized by their various teams.
The Customer
The customer is Singapore’s longest-established bank, being the second-largest financial services group in Southeast Asia by assets. It has been recognized for its financial strength and stability.
The bank’s services range from consumer, corporate, investment, private, and transaction banking to treasury, insurance, asset management, and stockbroking services.
Being one of the top 10 leading banks in Singapore, the vision of the bank has always been to move towards the adoption of the latest technologies.
Business Challenges
The customer had multiple data centers and applications running on the OpenShift container platform. With that, the customer had VMs (legacy applications mostly) based application setup as well. They wanted to have a single monitoring view of the performance of various applications.
The customer wanted to build a successful container log monitoring system through the proper implementation of the ELK cluster by keeping a track of all the logs that they would receive.
They also wanted to enrich the log information with more details like the pod, the namespace for different OpenShift containers set up for their various users, and monitoring of the source data.
The Solution
Technologies Implemented: ELK Stack
The Deployment Architecture Solution
Ashnik helped them to deploy a multi-node elastic cluster that was outside the open source platform to successfully ingest logs from OpenShift along with VM-based applications.
The process involved installing and configuring the Elasticsearch cluster, Logstash, and Kibana on another node. The next, step was to install and configure the Filebeat that was running as a daemon set of containers in OpenShift and as a service in VMs based application. The configuration and container plugin for OpenShift has helped in isolating metadata about different containers and data was identified based on the label and namespace.
Ashnik’s ELK experts helped to successfully integrate the existing Search Guard system for authentication with AD/LDAP and authorization with RBAC for Kibana access to the users. Our team also created sample visualization & dashboards, alerts, and multiple spaces for the customer’s different users and teams to access.
The Benefits
Opting for Ashnik’s ELK expertise enabled the customer to have a centralized view of the log monitoring platform. Post implementation the customer is now able to :
- Obtain insights from the setup done by the Ashnik team that has helped the customer with improved infrastructure time, response rates, performance, and system activity monitoring.
- Gain access to a fast and relevant log data search for quickly diagnosing and automating issues through alerts, dashboards, and visualization for performance metrics.
- Help multiple application teams based out of the container as well as non-container VM-based applications to monitor their application logs from a single interface.
Customer Delight
The customer is pleased with the design and approach of the Ashnik team and considered it a great return on their investment. The Ashnik team helped not only meet but also exceed the expectations that the customer had.